Red Rooms (2023)
Directed & Written by Pascal Plante
Starring Juliette Gariépy, Laurie Babin, Elisabeth Locas, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Natalie Tannous, Pierre Chagnon, & Guy Thauvette.

Thriller

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SPOILERS!
Turn back,
lest ye be spoiled forever.

Red Rooms is a film loaded with painfully relevant themes, as it takes on a slew of modern issues from society’s obsession with true crime, particularly the most gruesome bits and pieces, to the unbridled and violent capitalism that festers on the dark web. A mysterious model, Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), is obsessed with the trial of accused serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos). She and a Chevalier groupie, Clementine (Laurie Babin), meet while attending the trial every day. They soon dive deep into the dark web’s depths when Clementine demands to see the infamous videos of Chevalier’s crimes. And, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back; some things should just never be seen.

Plante’s film grapples with the contemporary landscape of North American society and its relationship with media by giving us a story about a serial killer that works hard not to make the murderer, nor his crimes, the star of the show, and instead focuses on the sick obsessions they provoke. Red Rooms is just as much about greed and how the love of capitalism has become so great it literally consumes people in the way of a meat grinder within the hidden terrifying online spaces facilitated via the dark web. It’s a film about society out of control and the many awful ways people are consumed, whether by obsession or by murder.
There’s an important juxtaposition in Red Rooms between people who seek out horrifying videos online, represented by Clem and Kelly-Anne, versus those who must watch them in order to do justice against killers like Chevalier. In the opening courtroom scene, the Crown attorney’s statement includes an apology for having to “inflict” horrors on the jury, as well as the families, when presenting the videos of Chevalier’s murders as evidence. The attorney makes clear why she uses the word ‘inflict’ when she states: “Because asking human beings to watch these kinds of videos is inflicting something on them.” While the world of the courts, no matter how deeply flawed, has evolved to protect those pulled into jury duty from being traumatised by witnessing hideous crime scene photos and videos, the online world has evolved in a much darker, more sinister, and very transparent direction—a lot of which comes down to the bottom line of contemporary society: money.

While Plante’s film isn’t focused primarily on capitalism, the story and its plots are intertwined with greed and money. The lore of “red rooms” is used here as a way to confront not only the way people seek out disturbing and often times illegal videos depicting murder (among other things, such as sexual torture and more), it also digs into the dark web’s economy and immoral depths. On the dark web, anything can be bought and sold for currency, right down to the life of a human being, or so the ‘red room’ urban legend says. You can buy the torture and killing of another human for whatever market value dictates is the appropriate price. Although ‘red rooms’ are still an urban legend of the digital age, there are no shortage of terrifyingly violent videos of real murder available on the deepest, darkest parts of the internet.
After the Invasion of Iraq following 9/11, videos depicting several infamous beheadings of American hostages by ISIS littered online spaces, and most weren’t on the dark web, they were lying in wait deep within search engines if people knew where to go. Today, vicious beheadings, flayings, and other torture methods caught on video by Mexican cartel members are floating around in the world wide web’s ether; once again, these aren’t on the dark web, they’re on the regular ole internet for anybody to see should they be able to navigate themselves there. What Plante’s Red Rooms does is facilitate a difficult look at the true crime obsession by positing the people who pay to see murders and horrific moments of torture as the end of the line for those who are too interested in the gory details of a victim’s final moments on Earth; a contemporary addiction with potentially hazardous results.
There’s a strong message in Plante’s film about how one chooses to use their money and how one directs the energy of their obsessions. Kelly-Anne herself says that money is just “numbers“—it isn’t a tangible thing, especially in this day and age evidenced by the use of Bitcoin and other digital currencies—and proves how wealth can be manipulated to one’s advantage. As she goes on to prove, in the end, it’s all about how you use money’s advantage and its power. Kelly-Anne chooses to use her money in what initially seems a selfish way; one that reveals the darkest heart of her obsessions. By the time the film’s finale arrives, her motives are not entirely what the audience might expect.

The true brilliance of Red Rooms lies in how Plante portrays Kelly-Anne as someone wallowing in a darkness that threatens to consume her but eventually reveals that her morals will not allow her to simply consume the pain and death of Chevalier’s victims like food to be transformed into nothing except waste. Kelly-Anne still remains a somewhat ambiguous, mysterious figure at the very end. Her final choice is one that offers a ray of hope in an otherwise chilling, relentlessly disturbing film. Her choice resonates in real life, too. Kelly-Anne may not be done with her true crime obsession, or the disturbing lengths to which it takes her, but, unlike many, she chose to convert that obsession into something other than solely a sick pleasure when she found the ugly treasure at the end of the dark web’s black rainbow. This is the same as many online sleuths who’ve turned a ‘love’ of true crime into an amateur detective career. This doesn’t absolve Kelly-Anne or anyone else from a potentially unhealthy obsession, however, it absolves her, and those like her, from being monstrous consumers of murder and torture without any real care for victims and their families. Sometimes within the darkness there is a light, if only one doesn’t allow it to be extinguished.